Amputee Reunited With His Arm 47 Years After Losing It

Have you ever lost something important like your wallet or a set of keys, figured it was gone for good... then it suddenly turned up out of nowhere? This story definitely tops that! Houston doctor Sam Axelrad was a surgeon during the Vietnam War. In 1966, he amputated the arm of a North Vietnamese soldier named Nguyen Quang Hung. Sam's colleagues decided to save the bones, reconstruct them, and give him the arm as a sort of souvenir before he left.

But when he got back to the U.S., he put them in a bag, put the bag in a closet, and forgot about them. Then in 2011, he found the bag and decided to track down the man who lost his arm. He traveled to Vietnam last summer to look for him, but didn't have any luck.

He did run into a Vietnamese journalist, who ended up publishing an article about it. Hung's brother-in-law happened to read that article, and contacted the newspaper about it. Yesterday, Hung and his arm were finally reunited 47 years after the amputation. Get the full story and see reunion photos here.